The Power of Frame Control in Hypnosis

Hypnosis, and especially Conversational Hypnosis, is all about the language you use and the ways in which you structure that language.  You will be using the skills and valuable tools you learn in these articles to alter people’s states of consciousness and change their lives for the better.  One of the aspects you will have to have control over beside language is the frames that people have put themselves in mentally.

A frame is simply the way you reference things in your life to the outside world.  It is how you understand things in the scheme of things, so to speak.  All frames are interpreted by the context in which they lie.  If you see a man mowing his very small yard with a riding lawn mower you may initially think, “Give me a break you are so lazy.”  But if you change the context and you know the man has polio and cannot use his legs properly most people will have a different out look.  This is because the context of your frame has changed.  There is new information that makes you allow yourself to forgive the ‘laziness’ here.

There are frames that run through your life every day.  The beliefs you have, the way you interpret wild crazy kids running amuck, politics, elderly drivers, women putting on make up while driving, men on cell phones while driving, morals and all these things are set in a context which is set within your mind.  Now that doesn’t mean that context can’t change, it just means that you have a preset frame to judge things by. 

If you can take control of the power behind a frame you are essentially taking control of a particular meaning behind an interaction.  If you can change the frame you will give a new meaning, probably completely different to the previous meaning the person originally had. 

With changing frames in a natural environment the more the information coming in changes the more likely you are to change your frame.  If a car speeds by you and cuts you off, initially most people will be angry or infuriated at the gull and complete disregard of the other people on the road. 

However if you have the inside information that inside that car is a dying child that needs to get to the hospital your frame would likely change.  You would be more willing to forgive the incident and move aside to let the car pass at whatever speed was necessary.

If we change the frame again and say the car sped past with a dying child in the back, but the driver stole the car and is not racing to the hospital but to the border of Mexico, your frame would likely change again.  So changing frames has a lot to do with the information that is provided and just as likely the information that has not come to be discovered yet.

Frames in general are an assumed set of assumptions that people use to measure the world they live in by.  Without frames there would be no deep seeded beliefs, in fact people would be pretty boring as they would really not have an opinion on much of anything.

Now when you have a frame there will usually be two polar opposites of it.  For example, organized religion is bad, and organized religion is good, or police officers are your friends and keep you safe; help you, and police officers are bullies and only want to catch you doing something wrong.  These are both sets of mind or frames that people have, are either of them completely true? 

The fact of the matter is that usually the truth lies somewhere in the middle.  Some police officers are good and do their jobs well; they do help you and protect you.  Other police officers are more out to catch you doing something bad or have been corrupted in some way. 

Logically from an outside point of view you know that both of these statements are true but other people, including maybe you, have a different context to put police officers in.  Maybe they were wrongly arrested and charged for a crime they did not commit, therefore their outlook on police officers is a bit jaded. 

Truth in frames is irrelevant simply because they are based on perceptions of what others see and in what context they base their frames.  There will always be a way to spin your frame one way or the other depending on the contexts you use.  The way to use this is to take control of frames so you have the power to lead the interactions you encounter.

This brings you to the new term of frame wars, this is when two different frames meet and battle it out until one frame gives way to the other frame.  When this happens with people one person’s ideas will eventually be overcome with the other person’s opinions and ideas and the winner will dominate the interaction.  This is simply a territorial interaction to see how the two will view the world, which will win, is the Earth flat or round?

So it will come in handy for you to know how to change frames in the people you meet and work with.  After all if you can win the frame war you will be in charge of leading the interaction and making it a positive one for all concerned, hypnosis.  Your main purpose in frames as a hypnotist is to be able to recognize them, recognize when someone is testing your frames and establish your frame as the dominate frame so you can lead the interaction.

Now we will get to all that in a moment in the next article, but first you have one more concept here to learn.  That is how to know when someone is testing your frames.  People will do this consciously or unconsciously it is simply the way human’s work, what does he/she think and do you agree or disagree with it.  We are all curious, and since we are a not cat that is a good thing.

When you meet new people there will almost always be frame testing going on, it is how you get to know a person, figuring out how you will measure them up in your world.  This testing is used to find out if you think they are being false or genuine, and once the interaction is battled out the tensions will ease as one of you will have won the frame war. 

After this happens things tend to flow better between you, this is because you now know your place with this person, you and the other person have both stuck your preverbal flags in the ground and know the others views.  At this point things will stay pretty calm, that is until new information is introduced. 

This is classic and happens everyday, you think you have a person all figured out and then they do something you don’t expect or agree with.  This is a new set of information or experience being added to the original set of frames which brings everything into question.

We will look at ways to win the frame wars in coming articles, this will be important as it will give you the ability to lead interactions to whatever conclusions you wish.

For more information please visit http://www.conversational-hypnosis.com